1. https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
I recently refinanced, and the lender kept getting hung up on how they needed to "contact my county" for verification. Well, in Connecticut a "county" is nothing more than a name on a map or an organizational method. It's not an actual government entity, there's no one to contact.
Massachusetts does organize the judiciary (and some other things like deed registration) by county but in at least most cases, everyone is actually a state employee.
Don't really know how it works in the country as a whole. My impression is that the South generally has more of a tradition of county government.
Street number, name, and zip code is all you need, but even the US postal service recommends keeping the city and state for redundancy.
It sometimes leads to funny situations if you live near city boundaries where you can get mail sent TO multiple different cities that are all your address.
As an engineer I get it, but damn if it isn’t annoying to not be able to have your real address on your packages...if only for aesthetic reasons.
However, Zip Codes directly map to one preferred place name designated by the USPS, and zero or more acceptable alternative place names. These are usually inspired by, but don't necessarily correspond to municipalities and political units that the lots in question belong under.
You're more than likely talking about Zip Code 94608, of whose preferred name is 'Emeryville', but 'Oakland' is an acceptable name [2]. There is a lot of software that takes the shortcut and autofills or autocorrects the preferred name, especially because informal lists of Zip Codes seem to be easier and/or cheaper to get a hold of than through official sources at the USPS [3].
Perhaps a nationally-known example is the Las Vegas Strip, most of whose famous casino-hotels are located in the unincorporated town and CDP of Paradise, but covered by two Zip Codes that only accept Las Vegas as the name.
In rural areas with weak local government, people develop an affinity for the preferred place name of their address' Zip Code, because it's a standardized way of referring to the locale where more specific names are not widely known.
[1] https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/zctas.html [2] https://california.hometownlocator.com/zip-codes/data,zipcod... [3] https://www.usps.com/nationalpremieraccounts/manageprocessan...
Why on Earth we have zipcodes but still add the city/state is beyond me.
I worked for a water utility in Melbourne Australia. There were (for but one example), two adjacent suburbs, Box Hill and Mont Albert, the latter of which had a perceived prestige.
We'd always have some people, and more so as you reached the border of the suburbs, who'd give their address as Mont Albert, but with Box Hill's post code. This allowed the system to be functional for our purposes without arguing with the customer.
Is it a problem we should have to deal with or feel compelled to? No, but that was the decision made, in this case.
For whatever reason, we decided that naming streets and numbering the buildings on them is too passé, so lots of our cities use District + Number (where the numbers carry no geographic meaning), in parallel with Street + Number, but every building is addressable using only one scheme.
Concrete example with the city of Sofia, Bulgaria - consider these two buildings [1] [2]. They're both next to Vasil Kalchev street. One is a kindergarten, the other is a block of flats. Let's see what the address for each is, if you want to send a letter to them. The kindergarten is, obviously, St. Pimen Zografski street No. 5... well OK, that's the street on the other side of the building, nothing too strange; while the block of flats is zh.k. Dianabad bl. 54. The abbreviations mean literally "residential district Dianabad, residential building number 54". No, the building is not addressable via the street, you cannot send post to that building or locate it on a map via "Vasil Kalchev street, No. X" for any X. There are, in fact, no numbers on Vasil Kalchev street. And the residential building numbers aren't geographically meaningful - directly east of said building 54 is building 53, but directly west of it are buildings 42 and 43. There is no building 44. There are, however, 33, 33A, and 33B. They are just ad-hoc numbers (maybe with letters) that you need to have in a database, like you have the locations of streets and where the numbers on the street are geographically.
[1] https://www.google.bg/maps/place/Kindergarten+49+Radost/@42.....
[2] https://www.google.bg/maps/place/42%C2%B039'53.7%22N+23%C2%B....
When you can pass through 3 states in 3 hours, it makes sense to "search for all McDonalds in NJ". However in TX and CA, "all McDonalds in TX" is worse than useless for what the customer is actually looking for.
750 McD's in New York, a state of 55,000 sq mi, ratio of ~0.015
1,250 McD's in Texas, a state of 270,000 sq mi, ratio of ~0.0045
1,500 McD's in California, a state of 165,000 sq mi, ratio of ~0.009
We have regions and départements. These are formal structures/entities but are never used in addresses (you get a hint of the département in the zip code).
The foreign web firms do list them, usually correctly. Sometimes they mix up the regions and the départements (usually using île de France, which is a region around Paris, and the rest being départements).
This is not harmful (and ignored during delivery) but shows a one size fits all approach
But as stated by others (about Ireland in their example), even companies that had their hq there asked for zip code at a time there was not any.
So I guess if you start shipping internationally, it’s a big job to make a form that fits every cases.
I wonder if someone have made a list of those particularities. Could be a good idea if not.
Post codes are not generally used in Ireland. The launch was not really successful and even An Post (the government-run postal service) doesn't use them.
Irish counties are fun, as the traditional 26 counties (in the Republic) don't align with the thirty-something administrative counties that now exist.
For the UK, "10, SW1A 2AA" is sufficient for an address [2]. To avoid mistakes, it's recommended to write "10 Downing Street, LONDON, SW1A 2AA", but this can be looked up in the database[1]. It's usual when entering an address online, or over the phone, to give the postcode, the number, and then confirm the street.
The postcode for my workplace in Copenhagen, 2100, covers a good chunk of the city. I have to mispronounce the street name several times when speaking on the phone :-S.
[1] https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode — try something like W14 9NL for a normal street.
[2] In fact, SW1A 2AA is sufficient for the Prime Minister's office. Places that get a lot of post are given their own postcode, it can be as specific as an office within a building.
Some fancy webpages fill them in automatically.